Around April 12, 1863

In this day and age, newspapers rarely print fiction. Of course, there is the occasional magical story written by a third grade class that appears every once a week in the Arts and Entertainment section of the paper, but for the most part, fictional stories of real substance are not published in newspapers anymore. This was not the case in the 1800's. Appearing in The Valley Star each week was...

Writing home to his mother on April 12, 1863, Assistant Surgeon to the 22nd regiment of Alabama Infantry, Matt Turner captured the sentiments of many others in the Confederate Army as he spoke of wishing to return to his home. Turner wrote his letter from a “camp near Shelbysville Tennessee,” where he was “alone except the agreeable company of the lame, the halt and the blind...

The letters of a drummer boy are a gathering of the letters of a sixteen years old drummer boy in the 47th Indiana Regiment during the Civil War. His letters to his parents show how an adolescent would see the war from the front. The 47th was active in the Western theater during the whole war, aside from the Vicksburg campaign, but the little everyday facts show better what war was like.

By mid-1863 the city of Vicksburg, Mississippi was the final Confederate bastion on the Mississippi River, making it all that stood between General Ulysses S. Grant and the East/West division of the Confederacy itself, a goal stipulated in the Anaconda Plan. Since its capture would mean a major strategic victory for the North, the city held immense symbolic, as well as strategic, importance to both...

April 4th 1863 at two in the morning the steamboat Sam Gaty stopped on the Independence River at Sibley and was ambushed by band of bushwhackers, that killed fifteen “contrabands” and two other whites. There was a resentment at the Union for the acceptance of the escaped slaves, whom some had been undertaken as labor to the Union forces. "Contraband" described former...

Life as a Civil War soldier involved fighting and immense amounts of sitting and waiting. Soldiers from both sides of the war wrote letters home to loved ones describing the daily events and occurrences in camp life. Life as a soldier required patience. Many soldiers recounted the long periods of time spent sitting in camp waiting for their chance to fight. At camps soldiers could actually...

Issued in April of 1863, General Orders 100, also referred to as the Lieber Code, provided the Union Army with clear instructions as to how to deal with captured Confederate soldiers, as well as non-combatants during the Civil War. Created at the request of Abraham Lincoln, the Lieber Code provided soldiers with rules and expectations for their conduct. The Code devoted an entire section to spies....

Union and Confederate uniforms were symbols of purpose and bravery for the soldiers who wore them, but for some they were merely a disguise. Over 4 million people fought in the Civil War, whether recruited or serving as volunteers. Among those who served were approximately 400 women disguised under male aliases. Among these 400 documented women was Sarah Rosetta Wakeman, a member of the 153rd Regiment....

On March 27, 1863, Reverend M. J. Michelbacher, rabbi of the Bayth Ahabah synagogue in Richmond, delivered a sermon on a day of prayer declared by Jefferson Davis. Michelbacher was a prominent Jewish leader in the Confederate capital. Although he had moved from Philadelphia in 1846, he was a fervent supporter of the Confederate cause even prior to secession. In the sermon, Michelbacher responded...

The artillery attentively prepared for the battle of Chancellorsville as Mathew Brady snapped the photo. In a photograph in The Photographic History of The Civil War in Ten, dozens of recently axed tress and stubs cover the ground and surround the cannons beside which the men listen alertly to the officer (20- 21). A few men stand at ready to insert the cannonballs before a misty field...